Karl Marx coined the term "capitalism" by analogy with feudalism. To describe societies where monopoly power, and resulting wealth concentration, allows monopolists to become aristocrats. That's what radical lefties like me are pointing to when we use the word.
But common usage of the word has drifted so far from its origins that it usually refers to any economy with money and markets. Resulting in a lot of conversations where people are talking right past each other.
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Me:
> Karl Marx coined the term "capitalism" by analogy with feudalism
A couple of comments have challenged this claim, which I thought I'd got from a few sources, including David Graeber, Dmitry Kleiner and c4ss org. Fact-checking myself produced inconclusive results so far.
Although it does suggest Marx wrote mostly in German, which makes it seems less likely he coined an English term, although his translators may have.
Can anyone clarify?
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However none of my critics have yet produced references that show "capitalism" being used interchangeably with "free enterprise system" before the Powell Memo.
Which AFAIK was when that usage began, as a strategic move. Implicitly redefining anticapitalists - opponents of monopoliaed industries giving rise to neo-feudalism - as enemies of "free enterprise" and "free markets" (free now of regulation, not of economic rents, as defined by Adam Smith).
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Me:
> none of my critics have yet produced references that show "capitalism" being used interchangeably with "free enterprise system" before the Powell Memo
Ok, now someone has;
https://mastodon.online/@MartyFouts/114710266803391658
I stand corrected. But my questionable historical summaries aside, these comment threads demonstrates the point I was making in the OP; "capitalism" has neither a fixed nor commonly agreed meaning. It serves no useful purpose in discussion, unless it's defined before it's deployed.
Some of us would push as far as saying that this situation is no accident, knowing people almost never make this effort & some cleverly know how to take advantage of it.
@MartyFouts
> Marx not only did not coin the term
There's a difference between creation and coinage of a popular term. Pedants have similarly noted that people had written "enshittification" before Cory Doctorow, but it was his usage that popularised it.
Sinilarly, AFAIK, it was English translations of Marx that got "capitalism" into common use, and his definition was the dominant one until about 50 years ago. Happy to read references that indicate otherwise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Anyway, nearly every word in English has multiple definitions and definitely “capitalism” was used to mean different things at least 100 years ago.
That's because he wrote in German.
The German word is Kapitalismus and he didn’t use it either.
Just for clarity, my specific argument was that although Marx wrote mostly (entirely?) in German;
> it was English translations of Marx that got "capitalism" into common use
But I'm climbing down from that claim too, at least for now. It may be that people translating Marx chose "capitalism" and "capitalist" for uses already established;
I'll be more circumspect in making specific claims about the etymology until I've been able to confirm it.
But the core point of the thread remains. For most of the 20th century "capitalism" was a pejorative used only by its opponents. Including libertarians who championed free enterprise (the phrase used by Adam Smith for a system free of economic rents). Even the Powell Memo uses "free enterprise" and "American economic system", not "capitalism".
@strypey Hand in hand with defining what we mean by "capitalism", I find the vaguely defined term of "property" problematic. In work on standards for land administration domain, we have come to replacing the term property with the "3 R's", Rights, Restrictions, and Responsibilities. The libertarian notion of property is rather unrealistically totalitarian as per Locke (likely more so). Nothing we own - including our own selfs - are free of restrictions and responsibilities alongside rights
For better or worse, the meanings of words change over time. To use an arcane definition (or, worse, an entirely contrived "definition" that has NEVER been generally accepted, as far too many people do) is to avoid having an honest discussion regarding the ideas and principles at hand.
To insist that a words has one fixed meaning, when it's observable that they have multiple widely used meanings, is also to ...
@AlexanderKingsbury
> avoid having an honest discussion regarding the ideas and principles at hand
Definitely a claim you can make. Is there anyone you can point to who insists that "capitalism" has "one fixed meaning"?
Over the last few decades we've seen a plethora of novel terms - corporatism, oligarchy, enshittification, and technofeudalism - cooked up to describe pretty much the same dynamics that Marx created "capitalism" to describe. I can see why.
I've found there's so little consensus now on what "capitalism" means that unless it's explicitly defined beforehand, it derails more conversations than it facilitates. So even though I still consider myself an anti-capitalist, I seldom use the word.
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indeed, and the funniest part of all of this is the flea market fundamentalist just happened to turn out the most ardent anti-capitalist ever (to use the meaning it has come to have).
Economists like Milton Friedman constantly confounded the two together. That capitalism was freedom liberty that capitalism was a market based economy.
I am perfectly willing to take the word capitalism in find it irretrievably to the likes of US healthcare, to Boeing, to Elon Musk.
Capitalism is US healthcare taking all your money and then denying you care.
Capitalism is what happened to Boeing.
Capitalism is the pay pal mafia and their ruthless psychopathy.
But most especially demonstrate the capitalism is anti-market and anti-democracy.
What Milton Friedman built with false equivalence can be pulled apart by accurate observation.
I literally had this discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog a couple weeks ago, and literally PhD Economists admitted they didn't know the origin of this word.
Turns out I don't either. Do you?
Seems I may have been wrong that it was Marx, as there are examples of usage preceding him;
https://www.etymonline.com/word/capitalism
Or maybe I was half right, that it was translators of Marx using "capitalism" in place of the German terms he used in Das Kapital that popularised it. The etymology of "capitalist" suggests that term certainly wasn't coined as a compliment;
Ricardo described the concept of a landowner capturing the "Ricardian rent" around 1809
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@dlakelan
> it was used to refer to the accumulation of power over others
That's my understanding, but I'm trying to find solid sources, so I can back it up when challenged. I may be making a classic mistake in seeking a single point of origin though. We see parallel evolution in species, why not in human concepts?
Etymonline did help me out with the origin of "capitalist", which it says originated as a pejorative in the French Revolution;
https://www.etymonline.com/word/capitalist
So ...
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> Ricardo described the concept of a landowner capturing the "Ricardian rent"
I haven't read Ricardo myself, but if he disliked economic rents as much as Adam Smith, I'm guessing he used "capitalism" in the negative, riffing off that French Revolution usage.
I've read that Marx was aware of, and influenced by Ricardo's work. So his usage may have borrowed by the English speakers translating Marx, or they may have adapted it from "capitalist" too. Would be good to know.
Part of the Powell Memo strategy was to purge academic economics departments of people who wouldn't sing from the neoclassical songbook, including the people who used to teach heterodox economic history. Replacing it with Just So stories like the myth of barter, and distortions of classical economists like Adam Smith (eg implying "free markets" mean free of regulation, rather than free of economic rents).
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
